1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system for analyzing and visualizing access statistics for a web site.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many webmasters value the ability to obtain a detailed understanding of the number and location of those accessing their web sites. This information can be an essential tool in the quest to secure advertising revenue and to understand how better to make a site attractive to users in different locations (e.g. different language versions). Therefore, a range of hit counters and web analysis tools are available. These tools provide systems for counting the number of visitors to a web site, and for analyzing the log files kept by a server.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,804,701 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,458 disclose a system and method for monitoring and analyzing Internet traffic. The disclosed system and method processes data by reading log files produced by web servers, or by interfacing with the web server in real time, processing the data as it occurs.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,039,689 discloses a method and system for determining geographical regions of hosts in a network by preselecting sample hosts in the network, the geographical location of the preselected servers being determined.
However, existing systems suffer from several problems that limit their usefulness. They provide only numerical output with no visualization capability or provide visualization that is limited in scale. Alternatively, they may provide large-scale visualization but require advanced technical knowledge to run. Also, they do not provide a compact in situ representation of the results that is instantly visible on the very site they are analyzing.